“Deep silence,” I said again. “This is great, Nikki. Where does this leave us, though? Are we thinking that Valen and his New Soviet study group are causing earthquakes all over the world? Why? Is there a pattern to where those quakes took place?”
“I’ve been putting that together, but I’m nowhere near done yet. We’ve been looking at anything related to seismic activity, with a bias toward unusual or unexpected activity, and we got a bunch of stuff, including one in January in Vrancea in Romania. Remember that one? Did a load of damage there and in Moldova, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.”
“Yeah, but I read that they had a history of earthquakes there.”
“Sure, sure,” said Doc, “but the timing and some other stuff about it were kind of weird. Even though the epicenter was in Romania, the fault line running straight into Ukraine was suddenly much wider and did more damage than in any of the previous quakes in 1940, 1977, 1986, and 1990. A lot more.”
“Where’s the timing weirdness in that?”
Doc winked. She is the only person I know who can pull off a wink in this kind of circumstance and really make it work. “Two weeks before the quake, the Ukrainians moved a significant number of tanks onto a base there. A refitting base where those tanks were being upgraded with new targeting systems purchased from the United States. The quake destroyed most of that base, and many of the tanks were badly damaged. Estimates are that it set the Ukraine resistance to Russian invasion back by six months.”
“Hunh,” I grunted.
“There’s more, Joe,” said Nikki. “There’s been a slew of small earthquakes around the world over the last four years. I looked at all of them and isolated eleven that were in geologically stable areas. And another six that were in areas near a dormant volcano that suddenly went active. And in each of those places there was an uptick in suicides. Anywhere from three to nineteen percent above normal.”
“Oh,” I said. “Shit. Are any of those other sites strategically useful to Russia? Or to a new Soviet Union?”
“Not really,” conceded Nikki. “Actually, most of them aren’t strategically useful to anyone for anything.”
“Unless they are,” said Doc, and I nodded, seeing where she was going with that.
“Testing sites for the earthquake tech?” I suggested. She blew me a kiss.
The pilot’s voice filled the air to tell me we were beginning our descent to the airfield.
“Okay,” I said, “so that still doesn’t tell me why I’m flying to Moscow. This is State Department stuff. I’m not sanctioned for ops on foreign soil without some kind of approval. Even black ops have to be approved by someone.”
“You think this president is going to give you his blessing to carry out a mission to Russia that’s tied to election rigging?”
“That earthquake nearly killed him,” I said. “I think the honeymoon’s over. I mean, as wake-up calls go, this is one for the history books.”
“Thirteen hundred and eighty-four dead,” said Nikki.
The numbers hurt. They hurt real damn bad.
“Moscow,” I said to Nikki.
“Okay,” she said, and I could see that her eyes were wet, “one of Valen’s pen pals is a Yuri Rolgavitch. His family owns a big import-export business that deals mostly with electronics. Radios, speakers, headphones. Like that. Yuri recently took over the company when his father had to retire because of diabetes. He sometimes uses his company e-mail server for private correspondence.”
“That’s thin.”
“No, it gets better,” she said quickly. “We picked apart Yuri Rolgavitch’s e-mails. Not just the ones to Valen, but some other stuff that he sent out as encrypted. There were e-mails to e-mail accounts here in the States, and in a couple of them I found several coded references to something that is scaring the living crap out of me. I don’t have full context because it was only a couple of oblique references to ‘ zemletryaseniye.’ That’s Russian for—”
“Earthquake,” I said quietly. “Holy rat shit.”
The floor seemed to tilt under me, and I didn’t think it was because the jet was landing.
“That e-mail is dated eight months ago,” said Nikki. “And there’s more. There are other mentions of zemletryaseniye, and the corresponding dates are close to other earthquakes, like the big one in Valparaiso two years ago. But the timing’s weird. Every reference predates the actual events. We tried to go deeper, but Bug thinks that their office mainframes aren’t connected to the Internet. We can’t get anything more than that. But… well, what do you think?”
I took a deep breath. “I think I’d like to go to Moscow. Better call Top and Bunny and have them tell the rest of Echo Team that we’re going hunting.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
Church and Brick sat on opposite sides of a borrowed desk, both of them making calls, taking calls, and responding to intelligence reports via their laptops. On the Scroll, various DMS heads popped up to provide more data.
Information was flooding in.
“This is starting to make some sense,” said Brick. “But it feels like we’re a little farther back behind the eight ball than usual. How’d these bastards get this far without us catching a whiff?”
“Because of betrayals and loose lips, there are too many people in too many places who know about the DMS and what we can do. They know about MindReader and its potential, and they plan accordingly.”
Brick sighed and took a sip of Diet Dr Pepper. “Really makes me long for the old days when we were an actual secret secret organization.”
It was meant as a joke, but Brick saw the look in Church’s eyes.
“What?” he asked.
“Let’s just say that we’re very much on the same page.”
CHAPTER NINETY
Friendship is a fickle and fragile ol’ thing. Especially when we’re talking the friendship between nations.
Case in point…
The relationship between Russia and the United States has always been a little weird. Maybe more than a little, actually. At the beginning of World War II we were not pals because Russia was part of the grouchy little Kaffeeklatsch that was the Axis powers. Then when Hitler stepped on his own dick and invaded Russia, suddenly we were chums standing shoulder to shoulder to save the world from evil. I remember history-book photos of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill looking like frat brothers at the Yalta Conference. Smiles all around. The enemy of my enemy. That sort of thing. Political exigencies can often be embarrassing to students of history, or, say, truth.
At the end of the war, General George Patton wanted to roll his tanks into Russia because he was positive they were going to be the next big threat. He was talked out of it, or maybe assassinated. Opinions differ. There was some discussion about dropping an atomic bomb on the Kremlin. I’m no political philosopher, so I don’t know if that would have been a good move or a bad one. One view is that it would have stopped the spread of Communism right there, prevented the Cold War, and the phrase “mutually assured destruction” would not have entered the global lexicon. Maybe that would have ensured that no one ever developed a competing nuclear program. On the other hand, there would have been hundreds of thousands of innocent dead and we would have taken the third step on the pathway to establishing an American Empire with a proven track record for using atomic bombs as policy statements. That’s scary, no matter from which direction it’s viewed.